Inside the echo chamber of online gender‑based hate speech

Abstract

This study examines the discursive construction of online gender-based hate speech in Facebook comments responding to a news about intimate partner violence case involving a female celebrity figure in the Balkans. It advances an interdisciplinary mixed-methods framework combining Quantitative Content Analysis with Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, Speech Act Theory, and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. Situating gender-based hate speech within the sociotechnical dynamics of social media platforms, the study investigates how affordances such as visibility, interaction, and likeability, amplify and normalize hostility and aggression toward victims. Quantitative findings reveal a marked predominance of male commenters and an overwhelming prevalence of discourses legitimizing or trivializing violence, with mocking emerging as the dominant speech-act pattern, followed by victim blaming. The analysis demonstrates how humorous and ironic hostility operates as a subtle but powerful mechanism of online gender-based hate speech, transforming the comment section into an echo chamber that trivializes the violence. By combining discourse pragmatics with FCDA and SM-CDS, the study contributes to research on gendered digital publics by showing how platform-mediated discourse functions as a site of patriarchal moral regulation, where gender-based hate speech is normalized and interactionally co-constructed. The relevance of the results is further enhanced by the study’s focus on a less researched linguistic and cultural context. Although Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Balkans more broadly, are characterized by deeply rooted patriarchal norms, the discursive construction of these norms in online spaces remains significantly underexplored.